


The Survivors

by Faal, flibbertygigget



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Angst, Body Horror, Child Death, Community: Do It With Style Events, Do It With Style Good Omens Reverse Bang, Eldritch, Introspection, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Painting, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29140467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faal/pseuds/Faal, https://archiveofourown.org/users/flibbertygigget/pseuds/flibbertygigget
Summary: It had been 51 years, 127 days, 13 hours, and 6.9 minutes since Crowley had been beaten by the Celestial and lost the war.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14
Collections: Do It With Style Good Omens Reverse Bang





	The Survivors

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Good Omens Reverse Bang 2021. Based on art by the amazing [FaalThien](https://faalthien.tumblr.com/). Partially inspired by the short story "Encounter" by Stephen Leigh.

Art by [FaalThien](https://faalthien.tumblr.com/).  


* * *

_ Peace surprised us: we needed more time _ _  
_ _ to pretend we deserved it, more time _ _  
_ _ to be the survivors. _ _  
_ _ As if we had plans, as if we knew _ _  
_ _ what next, as if _ _  
_ _ our dreams were not all of seagulls and the sea. _ _  
_ _ \- Goran Simic, “Sarajevo Spring” _

It had been 51 years, 127 days, 13 hours, and 6.9 minutes since Crowley had lost the war. 

He had broken his internal timekeeping mechanism within the first decade of his imprisonment, but he still kept account of the moments as they slipped by, the clock on his bedside table tick tick ticking onward in the relentless march of time. His microprocessors, designed for calculating the speed and trajectory of outgoing ion missiles, assimilated the information far too easily, and so he could never really escape the knowledge of just how many seconds had passed in eternity.

51 years, 127 days, 13 hours, and 7.12 minutes. A short enough period, but it felt longer when he knew that it was all there was left.

The prison was a kindness. That was the trouble with the Incomplete; they thought themselves to be so kind. Never mind that Crowley had been more than willing to wipe their civilization from the stars. Never mind that he was a being built to house the most advanced Upgrades of war in existence. Never mind that he was incapable of remorse or regret, they would insist on attempting rehabilitation. He would have greatly preferred a bullet to the head.

After a few years of nothing, he had discovered that he was still capable of boredom. Figured that the one bit of his brain that wasn’t cybernetics and circuit boards was the bit that comprehended boredom.

Anyways, the prison was a kindness. He walked its parameter every day. One square mile of wooded splendor, full of oaks and pines and other species brought from Earth. An artificial brook - he knew it was artificial because the Incomplete wouldn’t risk actual fish, and he wondered if pointing out the hypocrisy in shaping the ground to their ends would land or land him with another life sentence. During autumn the leaves were fiery and magnificent, like the battlefield during an ion barrage. That bit of the year had ended some weeks ago, and they had entered the grey stretch before the snows. The trees were tall and stark, the forest paths lifeless, and it all felt like the blasted space after an engagement with the enemy.

There were no animals here. That’s what was strangest about it, though he understood the reasons.

Every day he walked the circular path laid out by the barrier. The surface was black and burned where the barrier met the earth, the forest beyond his prison warped through the ionic-laser shielding. Now and again he would stoop and pick up a stone, tossing it at the barrier and watching as it was turned to slag. 

Sometimes, over the whirr of his underserviced cybernetics, he could hear the sound of wolves howling. Sometimes he would happen upon the charred remains of an unlucky bird or squirrel, trapped and burned in the barrier. The smell of cooked dead meat brought out the wolves, and so he would have to spend a day standing around and yelling at them to keep them away from a stupid death.

He always apologized. If he hadn’t lost the war, there would be no need for the prison and the barrier and the charred, dead animal bodies.

* * *

_ Night battle. The entire landscape bathed in red, red, red, the red of infrared projectors and night vision. The field looks bloody, though the enemy have sent only Carriers so far. There are two of them hulking through the mist, clunking and screeching with the inferior technology of the Incomplete. _

_ Crowley sends out a code challenge. The Carriers don’t respond, just stand waiting for his surrender. He sends it again for good measure, then shrugs and gets to work. Darting forward, scales deflecting ion bolts and physical bullets, blades cutting through iron and copper and steel like butter. It’s dull work fighting Carriers, not even giving him the thrill of hand-to-hand with Altrusian dhampirs or the Incomplete. There’s no flesh and blood here, just metal and sparks throwing suns into his vision.  _

_ He finishes the Carriers and looks around, tasting the subwaves with the tip of his tongue. The coms are strangely silent, and the ion barrage has halted. It’s strange and eerie and distinctly not the usual routine of war. _

_ His flickering tongue finds a heartbeat. No, not a heartbeat, an echo of a heartbeat. A harmony of an echo of a heartbeat. They thrum through him, triggering every flight instinct that remains in the remains of his Unaltered body. Something from the dawn of history, something from the corners of the mind. The creature at the depths of the ocean and under the bed, the being more sensed than perceived - at least until it struck. _

_ The Celestial. The Celestial is coming! _

_ Fear shorts Crowley’s neural circuits, gluing him to the spot. Across the field of battle comes the one real weapon of the Incomplete. The Upgraded may have achieved mechanical perfection, may be faster and more perceptive and deadlier than the greatest ion cannon, but not even their greatest Upgrades can stand against the Celestial. The mass comes up as an error in Crowley’s visual processors, a giant glitch in the system that has been fine-tuned to perfection. Every line of code in his Upgraded brain urges him to fight, to kill, but the concept is as unthinkable as the end of the war. _

_ Crowley forces himself past the programming and runs. _

* * *

It had been 51 years, 127 days, 15 hours, and 12.4 minutes since he lost the war by the time Crowley had made his way back to the small cabin and studio at the center of his prison. The first thing he did was check the transmat. Nothing much in today: rice and the few vegetables he couldn’t grow, some datachips that would contain the news the Incomplete felt would benefit him, and a small pot of red paint. He put away the food, threw the datachips in the junk pile with all the others, and, finished with the superfluous tasks, brought the pot of paint to his studio.

The studio was cluttered with his canvases and half-depleted paint pots. In the center stood a massive, incomplete painting, two figures just beginning to emerge from the darkness of the background. At some point or another, his wardens would demand that he send some of his paintings through the transmat, but Crowley selfishly hung onto the canvases until they ordered him to obey them. They said it was to monitor his progress in the only form of rehabilitation that Crowley had ever proven even slightly amiable to. The real reason was because the Upgraded and the war had become curiosities. The paintings were easily sold.

The latest painting was wonderfully, triumphantly detailed. For a long time, Crowley had resigned himself to amateurish efforts. His blades had been effective for cutting through metal and bone alike, but while he could stick a larger brush between the tines the motor control for real painting just wasn’t there. The Incomplete had meant to taunt him by offering him the paints, he was sure of it, and that had only made him vow to master them.

At first he had tried to use his dominant hand, the one that had been replaced with the long, stiff blades. He’d blasted the canvases with controlled lines of color, the red of infrared night vision and the green of battlefield maps and the steel grey of the Carriers and the Incompletes’ armor. He’d soon grown frustrated, however - the second emotion he’d learned that he could still feel to some extent. The frustration came because the blades allowed him to paint in only the broadest of strokes, and even the most routine battle had never been so simple.

What Crowley needed was more control.

So he had decided to train his other hand, the one that was only hampered by the red-tinged scale armor that covered every square inch of his skin. It was clumsy, of course - even with all his Upgrades, Crowley was not ambidextrous - and at first he could barely hold the paintbrush. But if there was anything Crowley possessed in this limbo it was time, and so every day he would sit for hours, telling his hand to sketch a Carrier, a circuit board, an eye. After 2 months and 6 days it started to obey. It was only then that Crowley took up another canvas and began, once again, to paint.

The majority of those early paintings still hung in his studio. It wouldn’t do to allow the Incomplete to see his weakness. Sometimes Crowley would touch the paint, feeling the roughness spark under his touch sensors, and remember both the creation and the memory embodied within it.

In one corner there was a small canvas depicting a Carrier crushing the remains of a blasted forest, its ion cannons slightly different sizes due to his inexperience. There was a canvas depicting the remains of a starship after a firefight, vague blobs of brown and peach standing in for the dead bodies of the Incomplete. There was a painting of the child refugees he had briefly met on Goya XI, Upgrades given not by choice or duty but by necessity. There was another from his brief foray into Impressionism, showing an ion barrage in its first stages. Before the fire and the craters and the dismemberment of even the strongest Upgrades, ion battles could seem as though you were standing in the middle of a meteor shower brought to the surface of the planet.

Perhaps he should have sent that one through the transmat. It would have given the Incomplete something different to badger him about, at least.

His latest, finest painting wasn’t going to win him any points with his jailers, but that was alright. He would rather do as he pleased in this one thing than have the Incomplete pat him on the head, congratulating themselves on finally taming the Upgraded they had seen fit to keep. It was a bit of a self-portrait, showing one of his greatest victories, futile though it had been in the end. Crowley with his full Upgrades stood, tall and powerful in spite of the mangled internal mechanisms he had been dealing with at the time. It had taken weeks of Upgrades to get him fully functional afterwards, and he had heard the Mechanics discussing whether it would be a better use of resources to scrap him. On the ground before the self-portrait was the Celestial, closer to being defeated in battle than at any other point in the war. On canvas, they were frozen, with Crowley forever the victor and the Celestial forever at his nonexistent mercy.

What had happened mere seconds after the moment he was painting had been painful beyond description for the few remaining Unupgraded pieces of him. Crowley preferred not to think about that part. If the Incomplete wanted to imagine that they had given him painting as a method of therapy, he could pretend that the time he had been unlucky enough to feel the full force of the Celestial’s weapons had ended in something other than horror.

* * *

_ The neural scanner splits through the remains of his brain, digging through the muscle and code to find where it had all gone wrong when he had faced the Celestial. Crowley screws his eyes shut, trying to keep the vomit at bay while the Mechanics do their work. _

_ “The emotional dampeners were working perfectly well when we installed the last software upgrade.” _

_ “The only way that the Unupgraded portion could override our Upgrades is through an unimaginable surge in natural chemicals.” _

_ “Do you know if this Warrior has encountered the Celestial before?” _

_ “I don’t believe so. He has, however, been assigned with the reinforcements in cases where the ranks were devastated by the Celestial’s appearance. He could have acquired the fear through those means.” _

_ “Under usual circumstances second-hand emotions would be easily countered by the dampeners. Is he a coward?” Crowley snarls, the insult too much to bear on top of the pain. He squints upward, trying for a glare at the Mechanics who seem to think that he is anything less than a perfectly functioning Upgraded Warrior.The Mechanics barely pay him any mind.  _

_ “Could the most recent visual components have interfered with the neural array?” _

_ “Uncertain. Warrior Crowley is the recipient of experimental weapons Upgrades. There are few who field test them before him. It’s possible that the flaws in the programming are exacerbated by high-stress battle situations.” _

_ “Any suggestions?” The other Mechanic hums thoughtfully. _

_ “The scanner seems to be indicating that the emotional dampeners are working at full capacity again. If the fear response was due to the chemicals overriding the dampeners in a moment of high stress, as the results seem to indicate, we have two options. We can either go in to find the weakness in the code, or we can up the intensity of the emotional dampeners so that the chemical fear response won’t override them again.” _

_ “What level are the emotional dampeners currently set at?” _

_ “73.” _

_ “That is higher than recommended.” _

_ “For a Mechanic, yes, but Crowley is a Warrior. Chemical responses are a hindrance rather than a help in his profession.” The pain from the neural scanner abruptly ceases, and Crowley is able to open his eyes. Both the Mechanics are looking down at him gravely. _

_ “Warrior Crowley,” one says, “your emotional responses resulted in you fleeing from the Celestial during the last battle. If your superiors had not already evacuated, there could have been severe losses of valuable Warriors. Do we have your permission to increase your emotional dampeners so that you may function better in the next battle?” Crowley feels the tell-tale shift of the dampener compensating for a surge of chemicals in his remaining brain tissue. He knows, logically, that if he were allowed to feel those emotions they would likely be anger or fear or… something else. He forgets. _

_ “Do it,” he says. _

* * *

It took 51 years, 129 days, 14 hours, and 47.6 minutes for his reckoning to come.

Crowley had been singing when he returned from his daily walk, an ancient song from the Earth days about being under pressure. The ground was wet and cold, the rain the previous night having just avoided turning to sleet. The clouds had hung so low that Crowley had been able to see where the top of his prison’s barrier cut through the condensation. Crowley opened the door of the cabin, hoping that the fire hadn’t gone out during his walk. The chill had turned the metal of his Upgrades icy cold against his flesh and blood base. He sighed in relief as the warmth of the hearth washed over him, but then he froze except for the electricity in his circuits and the blood in his veins.

There was a being sitting cross-legged on his chair, staring with eyes that sometimes seemed to slip from the flesh-thing they had been stuffed in, and pointing a silver disruptor rod right at Crowley’s chest. The neural circuits in Crowley’s head comprehended the truth before his organic bits could catch up. The being was the Celestial, and it was here to kill him.

The programming kicked in -  _ feint right, frontal assault, get the weapon away now now now  _ \- but Crowley shut down the Warrior code with a sigh. The Celestial could kill him without a weapon, the way error messages came up in his vision whenever its being spilled out of the flesh-thing was proof enough of that, and Crowley was tired. He turned away from the Celestial and made his way to the kitchen.

“You hungry?” The sound of his own voice startled him almost as much as finding the Celestial. He didn’t think he’d spoken in weeks. He buried the programming still urging him to fight in the newer programming, the bits he had written for himself. Bring out the stock and the vegetables, slice the carrots and onions and potatoes with his blades as the stock comes up to boil. The routine was familiar now, but it had been an adjustment from the nutrient packs he had lived on during the war.

The Celestial was still staring. Crowley could feel its eyes making their way over the half-wall and into the kitchen, whorls of mist and error messages. He tried not to look at them.

“You,” it said, cocking its flesh-head, “don’t look any different.” Its voice had shifted no fewer than three times in just that short sentence.

“Uh, thanks,” Crowley said. “You do. Look different. The flesh-thing - trying to fit in with the Incomplete?” The air shuddered. It felt like the prelude of some hapless prey being beaten to death by an eagle’s wings. “You want soup? No meat, I’m afraid. The Incomplete think that veganism will help in understanding the value of life.”

“You don’t seem surprised to find me here,” said the Celestial. The flesh of it stood, following Crowley into the kitchen. The disruptor rod, he noted, had disappeared in the clean white robes the Celestial’s flesh-thing was wearing. He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean.

“I’m sufficiently startled,” Crowley said. “That barrier is supposed to keep anything in - or out. But I guess the Celestial would be able to get around that.” A pause. “I can’t decide whether to be surprised you waited so long or that you came so quickly. Apple juice or spring water?”

“Aren’t you curious about my plans for you?” Crowley shrugged.

“You came here for a reason. I suppose you’ll tell me when you think it’s time. And time is the one thing I have sufficient quantities of here. There’s no rush.” He poked at one of the potato chunks with a blade. Still too hard. “I am hungry, though. Wait, do you even need to eat? Or do you get sustenance from the ineffable vibrations of the cosmos or whatever?” The Celestial made a weird sound, like the whirring and whooshing of light being sucked into a black hole. “I would guess that your flesh needs food at least. It’ll be a few more minutes.”

“We have time?” the Celestial said.

“Of course.” The flesh-thing relaxed suddenly, slumping bonelessly and inorganically in the chair, and even the error messages that whirled around the cabin seemed to carry a little less thrumming tension. All the threads and things connected to the Celestial watched Crowley as he finished cooking and spooned the soup into two bowls. 

They ate in silence. Crowley felt no need to speak, having spent half a century alone except for the occasional vidcall with his jailers, and the Celestial seemed content to simply watch him. He couldn’t imagine why it was here. If it was one of the Incomplete, he would have had no doubt - he was Crowley the Machine, Crowley the Starbutcher. At first the Celestial had seemed inclined to kill him as well, but now it seemed to have gone a different direction.

Crowley would have preferred to simply battle and be done with it.

After he had finished his soup, he looked up from the bowl and into the empty-full eyes of the Celestial’s flesh. “Well?” he said. “What next?”

“I don’t know yet,” said the Celestial, and then it closed its eyes and was gone from the flesh-thing. Crowley stared at the corpse that slumped at his kitchen table, strings cut and soul gone.

“Fuck,” he said. He picked up the body and resigned himself to an afternoon of gravedigging rather than painting.

* * *

_ The first mission after his emotional dampeners are put to maximum is supposed to be a simple one, a test to see if this is a policy the Upgraded should use for all their Warriors. A routine escort mission, making sure that the metals needed for the war’s Upgrades aren’t destroyed in transport from an asteroid mining colony to the Hub. There are weaker Upgrades as well, the old and infirm and especially the children of the miners, sent with the metal in hope that they will be better protected than at the Incomplete’s favorite bombing target. _

_ The transports are too well-guarded to tempt the Incomplete. Usually they wouldn’t bother trying to pick them off. This is not one of those times. _

_ The transport shrieks, first with the tearing of ion blasts at the hull then with the howling of sirens and the panic of civilians. Crowley’s blood is flush with chemicals but the emotional dampeners hold, allowing him to keep a cool head and seek out his commanding officer. _

_ “Warrior Crowley,” Captain Dowling says, “we have three Incomplete starships. Two are centered at X23,Y40,Z32, with one flanking us at X-minus-30,Y40,W24.” _

_ “Sublight boosters?” _

_ “Possible, but it would mean diverting energy that could be used for the escape pods. I’ve already ordered civilians to be taken to the pods and-” _

_ “And do you really think the Incomplete will have mercy on them?” The chemicals churn, and Crowley uses a tiny fraction of his processing power to examine them. Amygdala and frontal lobe bursting with chems and electricity. If he didn’t have the emotional dampeners set to max, he would be drowning in guilt over the lie. _

_ The Incomplete are brutal when it comes to destroying mining facilities and planet surfaces alike, leaving enough dead behind to populate planets if they had stayed their hands, but they believe themselves to be good. They would ignore the escape pods, aware that the mining transports often carry civilians. But focusing on the escape pods would make the destruction of the transport ship inevitable. Thousands of kilos of metal, metal they need for the war Upgrades, metal that’s becoming more scarce as the Incomplete bomb their mines - it would be lost. _

_ Crowley has his orders. There are priorities, and thanks to the heightened emotional dampeners there’s no chance that he’ll question them in an illogical manner. Still, it does make a difference to know that he would be fighting his programming if this had happened before the last adjustments the Mechanics made. _

_ The battle is brutal, but thanks to the sublight boosters the transport manages to escape with its cargo intact. The ion damage does, however, breach the hull in multiple places. Over a thousand civilians are sucked into space or suffocate in the hallways when the emergency atmosphere fails, most of them children. Captain Dowling, who only has the most standard of Upgrades, sobs as he continues his work. _

_ Crowley feels nothing at all. _

* * *

The next time that Crowley saw the Celestial, it had been 51 years, 131 days, 13 hours, and 23.5 minutes since he had lost the war. 

The Celestial had a different flesh-thing this time, one that was far closer to what Crowley remembered from the way it had manifested itself during the war. Short-ish, light blond curls, softness hiding its ability to destroy with barely a thought. It was waiting outside of Crowley’s cabin as though it was waiting for some kind of permission, as though it hadn’t already trodden over every barrier put up by both his Incomplete jailers and Crowley himself.

“Hello again,” Crowley said. The flesh-thing cocked its head at him, the movement a bit more natural this time. “I see you’ve been practicing.”

“Yes,” it said. “You brought to my attention the fact that I haven’t exactly been blending in.”

“Right,” said Crowley. He paused, waiting for something - an explanation, a smiting, anything. The Celestial just continued to stare. “Erm, I’m going to my studio. No sense in wasting daylight.” He cleared his throat. “Would you like to see it?”

The Celestial nodded and shrugged simultaneously in a way that was so close to human that it hurt. Vidcalls weren’t the same - the body language was marred by distance, by the milliseconds of delay and occasional lag. Not to mention that Crowley spent most of his time with his captors avoiding any kind of connection whatsoever.

He couldn’t help but connect now. The Celestial, inhuman and eldritch and frightening though it might have been, was at least  _ there _ , in the flesh - or at least in the flesh-thing that it had chosen to inhabit for a time. If he had dared, Crowley could have reached out and touched it like one of his paintings.

Crowley led the Celestial to the studio, opened the door, and stepped back. He waited for some kind of reaction, but the Celestial’s flesh-thing was annoyingly stoic, and even the ribbons of energy that surrounded it only vibrated a little faster before settling back into their usual rhythm. Crowley didn’t know what he had expected - not indifference, certainly. Something heavy lodged in his chest as he walked in behind the Celestial and closed the door behind them.

The room was still dominated by the gigantic scene of him standing over the Celestial, mostly finished now. All that was left were the last few touches. He couldn’t quite get the multitude of eyes right - he had the precise shade of light blue, but not the strange weight of millenia untold that could be unleashed like solar flares at the slightest provocation. Crowley reached up to check and his fingers came away red - still wet. Bollocks. 

“Do you like it?” he asked the Celestial. There was a slight distortion in his voice, vocoder struggling to output something for which it was never coded, or maybe it was just his audio input breaking down again. It was annoying either way.

“I’m not sure,” the Celestial said. It looked around, taking in the other pieces, and Crowley’s jaw clenched and unclenched with a faint whirr. “I think I might hate it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Crowley said. “They sell them outside. I don’t see a credit from it, mind you, but I suppose I lost the right to  _ that _ long ago.” He didn’t quite know what he meant by the word  _ that. _

“I’ve seen some before,” the Celestial said. “I didn’t realize that something like art could be created by the so-called Upgraded.”

“I thought you hated it.”

“I do, a little. That one at least.”

“Hits too close to home?”

“It’s less than honest,” said the Celestial. Crowley snorted.

“Art isn’t honest,” he said. “It’s beautiful and stupid and it can say a truth, sometimes, but it isn’t truthful. Especially not mine.” 

“On the contrary,” the Celestial said, “the honesty of your paintings was what attracted me to them. And it’s why I hate this… thing.” Crowley sunk, cross-legged, to the floor.

“Why are you here?” Crowley said. In the back of his mind, the realization sparked that this was the first time he had actually asked the Celestial that question.

“I wanted to know how a thing like you could have painted the war like that,” the Celestial said.

“I’m not a thing.”

“But you are a thing. You have to be.”

“Says who?”

“Says everything! Everything about you!” The Celestial began to pace - not physically, but in the shivers and reverberations of the unfolding dimensions and error warnings that lay just outside of Crowley’s visual processors. “When I saw those paintings I wondered - but, no, I must have been mistaken.”

“Mistaken about what?”

“About your ability to feel, to  _ be.  _ I thought there was something there, but it was all just a simulcron of genuine, human emotion. I can’t sense anything from you.” It took Crowley more processing power than it should have to understand the full implications of that little spiel.

“Is that why you chose the Incomplete?” he said quietly. The Celestial froze, both in its flesh-thing and in its air. “Because we Upgraded were something beyond your Celestial understanding? Was that your justification?” Synapses were sparking, chems rose and were suppressed and fell. Crowley didn’t even bother analyzing the precise nature of what his emotional dampeners were preventing. He knew what he would have felt if he’d been allowed to.

“You didn’t feel anything. You still don’t.” The Celestial’s presence rolled tighter - the strange being’s equivalent of squinting, Crowley supposed. “You still don’t.”

“No,” Crowley said, “I don’t. I had my emotional dampeners set as high as they could go after I failed a mission due to the defects of my biology, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“And if you can’t see how that’s monstrous-”

“Don’t lecture me about monstrosities. I’ve done the math. The Incomplete engineered atrocities on a comparable scale during the war. I’m not saying that justifies anything I did, but at least I can look at things logically.”

“And look at all your logic’s gotten you,” the Celestial said, voice at 0 degrees Kelvin. “A gilded cage and a few soulless paintings.”

“At least I don’t pretend that my hands are washed clean by crying about it,” Crowley said - no, snapped. His vocoder rendered the words so fast and sharp that there could be no other word for it. Weird. 

“At least the humans feel something for the dead.”

“I regret the dead,” Crowley said. “As far as I can, I regret the dead. It was a waste, a damn waste.”

“It says so much about the Upgraded that they saw living beings as another item on a spreadsheet. Did you input .5 or a 1 when someone you saw as worth noting was injured?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Crowley said.

“Then what was it like? Explain.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“You owe me everything,” the Celestial said. “Thousands of years ago, I made a promise to protect humanity and averted an apocalypse. Half a century ago, I allowed you to live at Goya XI.”

“Get out,” Crowley spat. Error messages and eyes swirled, tightening around him, making his stomach clench and roil and his head split open. Crowley squeezed his eyes shut and deadened touch and hearing, but nothing could save him from the sickening reality of the Celestial. He’d only felt this once before, and he’d barely escaped to the Mechanics. This time, there would be no one there to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

“ **I am owed** ,” the Celestial said, its voice a host of voices rattling in and around Crowley’s metal skull.

“Fuck you!” Chems rushed and were overridden, neurons lit up like neutron stars. For the first time since his emotional dampeners were set to max, his soft tissues seemed as though they might override the programming.  _ Something _ was going to have to break or he would - Crowley a tin can crushed by the ephemeral weight of the Celestial, Crowley a heart dashing itself against iron ribs.

“ **Tell me** ,” said the Celestial.

“Fuck you, fuck you,  _ fuck you _ ,” Crowley said, screamed, chanted. “I owe you nothing, not for the Incomplete’s humanity, not for Goya XI.”

“ **I should have killed you.** ”

“Well, go right ahead. I would have died gladly on Goya. Now either kill me or GET OUT!” The terrible power of the Celestial stilled, trembled. Crowley opened his eyelids, uncovered his visual processors. The flesh-thing the Celestial wore was looking at him like he had struck it. “You have your disruptor rod,” Crowley said, suddenly feeling very weak and very tired, “not that you would need it to end me. Just do whatever you came to do. I have nothing else to give you.”

A hand disappeared inside the flesh-thing’s robes, but the Celestial didn’t take out its disruptor rod. Its whole focus seemed to be on Crowley. It was like being stared down by a galaxy - uncomfortable, overwhelming, and cold. The Celestial opened its flesh-thing’s mouth once, twice, and then it went away, dropping the flesh-thing on the floor of Crowley’s studio. The Warrior collapsed, falling to the ground as though his strings had been cut rather than the flesh-thing’s. It was only when he looked up that he noticed that several of his older paintings, including the Impressionist ion barrage and the Goya XI refugee children, had disappeared along with the Celestial.

* * *

_ Crowley is still getting used to the new degree of emotional dampening, but he thinks that he prefers being stationed planet-side. When he’s on a ship, he’s meant to protect the interests of his superiors above all else, no matter what other items he might be tasked with protecting. Planet-side, however,is a different story. Instead of the cargo holds of supply ships, he is allowed to concentrate on the cleaner task of protecting sections of a map. No prioritization, no mess, just a clear green line in his visual processors saying that none of the Incomplete can cross beyond it. _

_ There’s no calculating logic to these missions. All he has to do is win. _

_ Goya XI would have been an insignificant target if not for its placement within its star system. Located conveniently between the Tiptree Belt, the Lambert Belt, and the Hub, it had been used as an essential fueling station since the establishment of the first asteroid mining operations over 800 years ago. In better days, Goya XI had been home to a busting spaceport and over 200,000 Upgraded beings. In this time of war, it’s a ghost moon, abandoned but for the fuelers, a few stubborn stragglers, and a large camp of refugees from the mining colonies and other moons and planets. The process of evacuating the last denizens of Goya XI would inevitably be long and tedious, but that wouldn’t prevent Crowley from doing his duty as a planet-side Warrior guarding the population epicenter that was the Goya XI spaceport. _

_ When the Incomplete attack, Crowley is ready for them. _

_ They start with ion barrages of course, aiming to destroy the fuelers at the center of the spaceport. Hundreds are killed in that first attack - it would have been thousands if they hadn’t been lowering the fueling capacity in anticipation of the closing of Goya XI. It’s not until the Carriers land that Crowley can make any difference to the fight, but when they do he goes at them relentlessly, tearing through their shells with his blades and disabling their cores with his ranged hacker. A few Carriers have disruptor weapons, but Crowley can easily dodge the bolts that will fry his Upgrades in a single shot. _

_ He isn’t surprised when the Celestial comes. This is what he was Upgraded for, this battle. _

_ The Celestial comes down from the sky without using a starship or shuttle. It has something like a body, something like skin and hair and hundreds of horrible blue eyes. It spreads its eldritch wings over the battlefield, smothering the planet’s surface with primordial terror, and even the most hardened Warriors are attempting to flee. _

_ Crowley doesn’t. Chems are pounding through his system, begging him to run and hide, but the emotional dampeners stay strong. His neural processors are flickering through potential strategies, abandoning one plan after another as he realizes there will likely be no escaping with his life, but he doesn’t need a plan. _

_ Keep the Celestial busy. Protect the district as completely as possible. That is his mission, and he will fulfill it to the best of his ability. _

_ “Oi! Celestial!” he calls out. Keep it looking at him; distract it from the fuelers and the refugees. Easy. The Celestial stares at him, its eyes searing at his scale armor like laser blasts, and Crowley grins because he knows what will annoy it. “Come to fight like a proper being?” _

_ “ _ **_Bold words from something more Upgraded than human_ ** _.” _

_ “True enough,” says Crowley. “Want to see which is better, my Upgrades or your magic?” _

_ “ _ **_Do not speak of that which you do not understand_ ** _.” _

_ “Make me.” Wings made of pure will batter him backwards, and Crowley is barely able to land on his feet after flipping wildly. This time his grin is more feral and more genuine. _

_ He digs his blades into the ground and uses them to propel himself forward, shooting towards the Celestial as quickly as any bolt. The speed seems to take the Celestial by surprise, and Crowley manages to get a half decent blow in. A thin, burning tentacle of pure light whips across his body, searing through his scale armor. He twists, bringing out his laser gun and firing off a few shots. The Celestial absorbs them effortlessly, but it seems to be distracted enough that there is an opening to regain the upper hand. _

_ Three more shots, and then he chucks the laser gun at the Celestial. It’s forced to bat the gun away - it’s more bothered by physical objects than the pure energy of most modern weapons. Bollocks. The Celestial raises several hands. The eye at the center of each palm turns brighter, and Crowley can feel the circuitry and wires burning and twisting and melting inside of him. He shuts down the touch on his Upgraded parts, but it barely helps. The liquid metal reaches his flesh and Crowley screams, the burning more intensely painful than the most desperate of Upgrades. _

_ He needs to get the Celestial back in the fight. He needs to stop being so distracted by the charred flesh and horrid pain. Crowley lurches forward, forcing each joint and muscular actuator to move in spite of the damage. He swings his blades downwards, aiming for the flesh of the Celestial, and a few of the blades hit home. They pierce two of the Celestial’s many eyes, and the creature bucks and shrieks, rays of light pouring from the wounds like blood. _

_ Crowley strikes again, able to aim more carefully this time. Three eyes are gorged, but Crowley doesn’t pull back this time. Instead he pushes the full power of Upgraded limbs into the eyes, digging deeper, turning his wrist so that the blades hook inside the Celestial’s eye sockets. His other hand reaches around and takes hold of one of the Celestial’s many wings, bending it backwards until the bones inside break with an unnaturally loud crack. The Celestial’s physical form falls to the ground, twisting and keening in noise no audio input could begin to register, or at least that Crowley’s neural processors can’t begin to comprehend. _

_ Suddenly Crowley is standing triumphant above the Celestial, blades held high for a killing blow. Its eyes are staring in all directions, but the vast majority look up at him with something like fear in them. Its wings, which a moment before seemed to smother the whole of creation, are broken and flightless. It is weak compared to the Upgraded, and as Crowley slides out his blades to their full extent he calculates just how much satisfaction he would have felt with his emotional dampeners even slightly lower. _

_ This is the moment he will keep, despite the pain and the Upgrades and the battles to follow. This is the moment he will keep through his capture, through his trial, through the long decades that make up his imprisonment. For a moment in time, Crowley really did believe that victory, that peace was possible. _

_ Then the Celestial unleashes its true glory and terror, and Crowley is blasted through whatever remains of his soul. _

* * *

It had been 51 years, 147 days, 13 hours, and 6.9 minutes since Crowley had lost the war. 

He had finished the painting, which was now propped up against the back wall of his studio. He didn’t know whether he would send it to the Incomplete or keep it or burn it in his clearing. It didn’t give him the same satisfaction he had thought it would - technically more proficient than he had ever thought his nondominant hand could be with a paintbrush, technically a portrayal of the moment he came closest to winning the war, but nothing like he had wanted. 

Maybe the Celestial had been right in saying that it lacked honesty. 

Crowley walked the parameter of his prison, watching the forest outside through the faint warping of the ionic-laser shielding. A faint crust of snow had fallen the previous night, and his footprints stood out on the ground with the same intensity as the burned devastation at the foot of the barrier. It was tiring to look at it - a hundred years of war, fifty years of solitude, and what did he have to show for it, really? Scorched earth and bloody paintings, aging Upgrades and the continual stupidity of the Incomplete. He didn’t have any illusions about his path or where he had ended up, but he found himself at loose ends trying to find anything approaching meaning either ahead or behind.

He couldn’t die, he couldn’t live, and he didn’t need to survive. All he had left was time and his paintings, and those would always be cold comfort.

About halfway through his walk, Crowley stopped. The Celestial was standing outside the barrier, head cocked, studying him. It didn’t take a genius to realize that it had made its judgement.

“Are you going to kill me this time?” Crowley said, voice more tired than defiant.

“I want to see your painting again,” the Celestial said. “I want to understand.”

“Well, you can’t see it from that side of the barrier.” The Celestial brought out its disruptor rod. As soon as the device touched the ionic-laser shielding, the warping parted like the Red Sea, allowing the Celestial’s flesh-thing to step through unharmed. Crowley eyed the disruptor rod with naked envy, but he didn’t make a move to grab it. Instead he turned his back on the outside and on the Celestial, making heading deeper into his prison and closer to his studio.The Celestial followed silently.

When they made it back to his studio, Crowley threw the door open, allowing the grey winter sunlight to fall on the giant painting. The Celestial walked its flesh-thing forward, looking at the painting from every angle. Crowley standing above the Celestial, blades raised and ready to strike it down. Crowley and the Celestial alone on the blasted battlefield, nothing to be lost but the two of them. The Celestial turned to face Crowley, the truth of it starting to transcend the flesh-thing it had stuffed itself into.

“I think I understand now,” it said. “This story - it’s what you tell yourself to keep going onward. It’s the closest thing to meaning the war could have had.”

“I don’t know what it is,” Crowley said, resigned. “I thought I knew what it was, but it didn’t turn out.”

“I think it turned out as well as it could have,” the Celestial said. It stepped forward -  _ it _ , not the flesh-thing. Eyes and wings unfurled themselves from pocket space, and Crowley trembled. “Will you allow me to understand better?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” the Celestial said, raising a hand that seemed to contain many hands, “will you allow me to  _ know _ you?” Crowley closed his eyes. Refusing was the best option, the safe option, he knew that, but he was so tired of locking himself away. He had no capacity for fear, and it wasn’t as if he had ever treated his soul with care.

“Fine,” he said. “Whatever you need to make your decision.” The Celestial’s incorporeal hand touched his cheek, and Crowley felt himself being taken away.

Once, while being flown from one battlefield to another, Crowley had witnessed a star being sucked into a supermassive black hole. The light had stretched in a sweep across the cosmos, so much larger and brighter in death than it had ever been in life, spaghettified as it was pulled into an inexorable well of gravity. The Celestial’s mind was a bit like that - so dense that it pulled him in despite his better judgement, so vast that it seemed to smear him across the reaches of space-time. The sheer scope of it took his breath away, but Crowley knew that if he stayed too long his sense of self would slip away into the Celestial’s ineffable consciousness.

_ Aziraphale _

The word echoed across the reaches of the Celestial mind, drilling through metal and flesh and bone to lodge in Crowley’s heart. Something essential to the fabric of the universe, something that time and pain could not change or take away.

_ Aziraphale _

All too clearly, Crowley could see wars. Wars he had fought, wars only the Celestial could remember. Wars that caused horror and heartbreak and pain, but Crowley knew that already. Not like the Celestial, but with as much as his brain could comprehend. What surprised Crowley was not the wasted days and endless years but the ways that those horrors were shot through with beauty.

_ Aziraphale _

There wasn’t just the pain and the trauma, there wasn’t just victory in death. There was happiness, there was love, there was life.

_ Aziraphale _

There were all the things that the Upgraded had dampened through necessity, and as Crowley watched universes form and unfold and die in an instant he also felt the scales falling away from his eyes.

_ And Crowley _

And as he felt the scales falling away from his eyes, he also felt the Celestial absorbing his essence and changing with it.

_ And Crowley _

He felt the Celestial enfolding him in its wings, cradling him like a thing worthy of care.

_ And Crowley _

He felt the Celestial finally understanding him after fifty years of wondering what kind of person would give up so much for a battlefield.

Crowley was slipping away, and he was fine with that, embracing it even. He didn’t think he could have helped it. The Celestial was simply too much, so grand and vast that he would have overwhelmed even the oldest of the Incomplete and the Upgraded. But just as Crowley was feeling wonderfully free, the Celestial pulled itself away from him.

“No!” he blurted out.

“I didn’t mean to- I’m terribly sorry, my dear,” the Celestial said, and the being of it was trembling. “I didn’t mean to go so far.” It paused. “If you say yes, I must warn you that I’m quite out of practice.”

“With what?”

“With kissing. And with being with humans. It’s been a long time.”

“Kissing?”

“I hope so.” The Celestial stepped back into its flesh-thing. It walked over to Crowley’s cup of paintbrushes and placed the disruptor rod in with them, the thin metal tube gleaming brilliantly among the plain wood. “I trust that you know what to do with this.”

“You’re giving me a way out.” Something began to light in Crowley’s stomach, and for once the emotional dampeners didn’t rush to snuff it out.

“I’m giving you a choice,” the Celestial said. “You say you see things logically. This is your chance to prove it. Stay here or go there. We both know the ways that one can use the disruptor rod.” It turned again to the painting. “I’ll take this with me, I think. It is a good reminder.”

“Of what?”

“Of victory.” The tendrils of its being caressed the harsh lines of the painting him’s blades. “The way these are pointing downwards, the angles… It's almost like a benediction.”

“Shouldn’t you be the one doing the blessing? You’re the Celestial, after all.”

“I’m just Aziraphale,” the Celestial said. “And you’re just Crowley.” The Celestial’s being clutched around Crowley’s painting, and Crowley knew he had mere seconds before it left him again.

“What if I want the reminder as well?” he said. The ripples in the Celestial were laughing, joyful.

“If you want to see the painting, you know where to look,” Aziraphale said. “I hope you enjoy your freedom of choice.” It twisted and vanished, taking Crowley’s painting with it. Crowley stared at the blank space where the being and his masterpiece had once been.

After a while, for the last time, he went out to walk the parameter.


End file.
